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Religion & Spirituality

Whether you believe in a higher power or not, this forum is dedicated to the topic of religion and spirituality. We live in a diverse world with different morals and ideas when it comes to our beliefs, so come in and share your thoughts.

Whether it can be predicted or not has nothing to do with recognizing randomness.

Actually, being able to predict it would disprove its randomness.

Well we know for a fact it ISN'T actually random, that's why it's called a pseudo-random number generator. What I mean is, the fact I cannot tell a set of pseudo-random numbers apart from a set of truly random numbers, says nothing of the predictability of the pseudo-random number generator.

The pseudo-random number generator may generate numbers that are completely indistinguishable from a truly random set, yet the pseduo-random generator is still inferior to true randomness because it is predictable, once we learn the algorithm.

The fact there is an algorithm at all should tell us it is inferior right off the bat. There is no known algorithm on the decay of an atom, and hence no chance at predicting the outcome, making it completely uncrackable.

"All of our behavior can be traced to biological events about which we have no conscious knowledge: this has always suggested that free will is an illusion."

As an algorithm it is crackable. It is also not natural, it is completely determined, which makes it less useful for studies on the paranormal. Plus, there is always going to be a chance there is a minor issue with the algorithm that will show a bias of some kind of a significant number of trials.

If pure randomness is necessary in a complex application, you will want to use a true-random generator (truly random as far as we know, anyway).

99% of the time pseudo-random is just fine, so for practical purposes there is little difference, but the 1% of the time you would need to use the decay of an atom would seem to suggest that method is superior, albeit in a small way.

I short, true randomness is suitable in ALL circumstances, whereas pseudo-randomness is only suitable for 99% of cases. Does that not imply superiority?

"All of our behavior can be traced to biological events about which we have no conscious knowledge: this has always suggested that free will is an illusion."

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